3.8.2. JNDI-bound SessionFactory
A JNDI-bound Hibernate
SessionFactory
can simplify the lookup function of the factory and create new Session
s. This is not, however, related to a JNDI bound Datasource
; both simply use the same registry.
If you wish to have the
SessionFactory
bound to a JNDI namespace, specify a name (e.g. java:hibernate/SessionFactory
) using the property hibernate.session_factory_name
. If this property is omitted, the SessionFactory
will not be bound to JNDI. This is especially useful in environments with a read-only JNDI default implementation (in Tomcat, for example).
When binding the
SessionFactory
to JNDI, Hibernate will use the values of hibernate.jndi.url
, hibernate.jndi.class
to instantiate an initial context. If they are not specified, the default InitialContext
will be used.
Hibernate will automatically place the
SessionFactory
in JNDI after you call cfg.buildSessionFactory()
. This means you will have this call in some start up code, or utility class in your application, unless you use JMX deployment with the HibernateService
(this is discussed later in greater detail).
If you use a JNDI
SessionFactory
, an EJB or any other class, you can obtain the SessionFactory
using a JNDI lookup.
It is recommended that you bind the
SessionFactory
to JNDI in a managed environment and use a static
singleton otherwise. To shield your application code from these details, we also recommend to hide the actual lookup code for a SessionFactory
in a helper class, such as HibernateUtil.getSessionFactory()
. Note that such a class is also a convenient way to start Hibernate (Refer to Section 1.1.6, “Start up and helpers”).